quickly, quickly is the project of Portland, OR-based musician and producer Graham Jonson. His latest record, I Heard That Noise, is out now on Ghostly.
(Photo Credit: Alec Marchant)
Lionel Williams is the leader of the LA-based psych band Vinyl Williams; Graham Jonson is a Portland-based musician and producer who performs as quickly, quickly. The latest quickly, quickly record, I Heard That Noise, was just released last week, so to celebrate, the Graham and Lionel got on the phone to catch up about it, and much more.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Lionel Williams: I discovered your music through the Easy Listening EP — I actually found the cassette at Wax Trax! in Denver.
Graham Jonson: Is that how you found it? Really?
Lionel: Yeah. I really resonated with your music and your production. I had an inkling that you self-produced your stuff, but I wasn’t sure because the production is really remarkable. You’ve worked with Moses Sumney and a lot of other artists that agree, I think, that what one individual can achieve with the means that they have is extraordinary. That freedom [of self-production], of being experimental and having the space and the time so that nothing’s rushed, nothing’s forced — it comes out, and the work gets done when it wants to be done.
Graham: Yeah, totally.
Lionel: A long time ago in Utah — where I was recording with just an M-Audio single channel interface — I got the chance to record for free at probably the best studio in Salt Lake City. They had a $2 million Neve board, and a huge room that’s bigger than Abbey Road. It was awesome. But the recording quality that came out of that was divided by, like, 10 of what I could do in my own room with my M-Audio interface. [Laughs.] That immediately defied the illusion for me.
Graham: Yeah. I’m a big fan of “the sound of the room.” And I don’t mean that in any technical sense of, “This is the greatest, most perfectly acoustically treated room ever.” I think all my music sounds like the basement. It’s this weird fucking room with this crazy dark burgundy carpet, and the whole room is slanted kind of.
Lionel: I thought you were going to say burgundy tones — that it sounded burgundy.
Graham: I mean, if there are any synesthesia-related things, burgundy is definitely in the music. But I remember when I did the Moses EP, Moses came to Portland, and a lot of those songs that I produced were recorded in that room. And I remember a friend who I’ve made a lot of music with called me and was like, “Bro, it sounds like I can hear the basement in these songs.” Which I think is cool because it creates this kind of subconscious throughline between everything that you make, because you’re using all the same gear and the room is the same.
But thank you for the kind words about my EP. I think I heard your music first in 2018, and felt a lot of the same things. That album you’d released, Opal — I remember listening to that thing over and over, and I completely resonated with the production choices and all the found sound stuff in there. And I was like, Yeah, this could have been recorded in a studio, but it probably was recorded in a lived in space. I feel like you can just hear it oftentimes. The more experimental shit that’s not, you know, huge concert hall experimental stuff — you can tell that it was recorded in a space because there’s so many little tricks and things that you wouldn’t be able to do in a big studio with an engineer and five or six people.
Lionel: Exactly. That was such an incredible time. There was 12 of us living at Non Plus Ultra, a venue warehouse in Silver Lake, and our studio was so chaotic, so messy, so crazy. There was a board on its side on the wall because we didn’t have space for it — it was just nailed to the wall. But it was the first time in my life where I’ve used cool gear, because I’ve never really been able to afford it. I have never really [had] the means to have more than what I need. But Grant Cabeza de Vaca provided an Otari 5050 reel-to-reel and a Carbon 16 channel board — which I still continue to use an eight-channel version of that — and we were just putting all of our collective resources together and making this wacky, absurd, irrational environment to be free and express yourself. That was the peak of that time, because it was two years after we moved into the space and we really had a lot of stuff going on, a lot of energy being developed and radiated out everywhere. And you can tell that it was just a makeshift studio with my $250 Tascam interface and a bunch of old stuff.
But yeah, I just love the playing with time and not having those restrictions — but still having the restrictions of just having a bunch of weird stuff that isn’t “industry standard,” quote-unquote.
Graham: Totally. Definitely in my studio, I’ve tried to cultivate things that people don’t really have. I don’t have any crazy compressors or preamps or anything, but the stuff that I do have is, like, wacky delay units and ‘80s digital reverbs. That’s the stuff that I’m into. And on the topic of reel-to-reels, I have this Teac A-4300 that I’m on my second roll of tape, and I’ve had this thing since 2019, probably — I just record over the roll, and once I reach the end, I flip it back. And so the whole sound of Easy Listening was basically just that tape degradation. I mixed all the songs, just lined them all up, and then ran it through the reel-to-reel one take. I think it was the first take that I did, and I just said, “Whatever dropouts or weird panning things happen, that’s it. No touching it.” And I think that’s kind of a classic home studio thing, the fuck ups, the flubs. Like, we’re not the best technical musicians in the world, but what we do have is the heart and the soul. You know what I’m saying?
Lionel: Absolutely. From a technical standpoint, it’s kind of alarmingly amazing to me that you ran that EP through that reel-to-reel with the degradation and it still was able to handle the low end. You must have mixed it really well. Because usually, unless I track right to a reel-to-reel, when I’m mastering to one for some reason it mushes the low end in a weird way. But the high end sounds beautiful. So that unit that you have is pretty special, that it can handle that. But I think that you just did a really good job not making the subs explode on your mixes or whatever. [Laughs.]
Graham: Thank you. Yeah, I feel like my specific reel-to-reel — this is kind of the way I approach all gear, or even plug-ins — but I could not tell you the technical differences between like 7.5 IPS and 15. Like, I know that it moves faster and uses more or less tape, but I don’t actually know what it’s doing. But I know the sound and the way that it affects the sound. So I know that on my reel-to-reel, 7.5 cuts the high end and boosts the low end; 15 increases the high end and also kind of boosts the low end, but not as much. It’s just these little things that I try to take into account. Like, if I know that I’m going to just crank this shit through the low tape speed, it’s going to boost the low end a ton, and I just turn the low end in the mix down a little bit to anticipate that.
Lionel: Do you do that while you’re sending to it, or do you go back and forth?
Graham: Sometimes I’ll do little test runs just make sure. I probably did that for all the songs, maybe just run 15 seconds through the reel-to-reel. I record everything straight to Ableton, so I’ll just do a test run to make sure that it’s not going to completely destroy the mix. But then, the way that it does affect the mix is kind of the whole point for me. So if it does boost the low in some weird way, or cut the high, that’s usually the sound that I’m going for.
Lionel: Yeah. I’ve done so many different types of tape stuff at this point, I found it is difficult to get it right. But sometimes you have to embrace the absurdity of textural possibilities and go with what your ear wants more than what is technically right.
Graham: Yeah.
Lionel: Do you get little feelings inside your body, like little indicators, that tell you if it’s good or not? Sometimes I have to listen to these little things, almost like spasms that I feel in my neck or my shoulders or my arms, and it tells me what’s going on. [Laughs.]
Graham: Totally. I have that too, to a certain extent, because there is a peak to my knowledge of technical mixing. So I can tell when something feels not right at all and I definitely need to change it, like something in the mix or in the performance or whatever. But that threshold only goes so far. I don’t have engineer ears, where I can’t pick out a teeny tiny sound or some super deep, low end shit that’s messing up the mix. But I definitely feel if there’s something that’s viscerally wrong with the song. At least for me, you kind of have to weigh if it is something that is worth going through the trouble of fixing. Like, let’s say you have this whole mix and the vocal is good and the performance is good, but you put too much tape delay on it or something — you have to weigh, Do I want to go back and recreate the exact tape delay sound that I had six months ago and try to get all the knobs exactly right, but just turn it down a little bit? Or is it something that I can just live with? And that’s also a part of home recording, just letting these things be weird and shitty. And I feel like that’s something that I’ve tried to lean into more and more.
Lionel: Yeah. I’ve noticed, especially in your lyrics, there’s a lot of realness and authenticity and real life experience, and themes of nature. With your new album, I feel like it’s not just a continuation of that, but an evolution of that — of going to even further levels of authenticity and realness, and towards the organic. Putting that in the foreground and all the distractions in the background — [as in,] all the tricks and any sense of manipulation which can come from really shiny pop music. Something that’s mixed really technically correct feels manipulative to me, almost.
Graham: Yeah, I totally feel that.
Lionel: “Raven” sounds like a one mic recording to me. It’s very lo-fi, and it’s attempting to transcend the production quality, and that’s something I always appreciate. What are your reflections on the organic and all that, those themes?
Graham: I mean, I feel the same way, sometimes you want to listen to a Katy Perry song and turn it up super loud and drive with the windows down. Some of that stuff is just perfect pop music. But, you know, this might sound pretentious, but we’re cursed with the burden of eclectic taste. Music that has that resonates a lot more with me. With digital recording, there is a sort of digital sheen to everything — even if you get a bad drum take or something, it’s running into a computer. It’s hard to get an R. Stevie Moore type sound when you’re using Ableton. You have to use that outboard tape stuff.
For “Raven specifically,” it was a raw recording, but it’s fabricated raw. I think on that one, for the vocals I close miked it, just a mic on the table. And then my drum mics are maybe six feet away, and I turned them up all the way on the interface and recorded everything. I was recording with the close mic as well, and then I just mixed that so it sounds like you’re in the room. So it’s these studio techniques to make it sound raw, but I knew what I was going for. And then with lyrics — that’s my least favorite part of the process. Because I come from such a production background, lyrics can really be a slog for me, just trying to write stuff that is sincere and real to me but not corny. Because my immediate inclination is, like, “Baby, I love you, baby, be my only one,” that type of stuff. Sometimes it’s hard for me to really dig into that.
I’m curious: after listening to so much of your music, your vocals are definitely a part of the song, and used almost as an instrument. A lot of times, to be honest, I can’t pick out full sentences that you’re saying. But the words I do hear create this really cerebral atmosphere that fits with the music.
Lionel: Yeah, I focus just more on the sound of the vocals as an instrument. It’s so interesting when I’m creating a melody with gibberish, and then I’m decoding the gibberish. My interests and my dreams start to come out of that. It’s something I’m trying to pull it towards consciously, but some of the words in there, sometimes I don’t even know the meaning of them. I have to look them up. But I actually love the puzzle of writing lyrics, even though, I agree, it’s the hardest part of writing a song.
With your lyrics, I feel like there’s this light heartedness that totally evades the corniness that you’re worried about. It’s very funny, like in “Satellite” from Easy Listening, you’re talking about losing your wallet — like, “Fuck, I lost my wallet.” [Laughs.] I loved that line. And with your new stuff, I feel like these are songs that you can play at a campfire for your friends. Which is different than your earlier stuff — the earlier you go, I feel like it gets more electronic and less lyrical. To me, at least, it feels like you focused a lot on the lyrics, and just being able to play a song with your friends and having that work on its own. It’s commendable that you made these tunes that don’t need much else. But how you dressed the stuff around it is super polarizing to the organicness of the sounds. I love how on the newest single that you released [“Take It From Me”], there’s a drum machine that just comes in for one second really quick and then comes out — like a trap hi hat that just comes in and then it’s out. It’s just some of these interesting, city, artificial sounds that are in the background of that nature experience that’s the foreground of it. That’s how I’m hearing it, anyway.
Graham: I appreciate it. All that stuff, that’s what I think my specialty is. Elliot [Cleverdon] — who is my roommate and plays live with me and is an incredible musician — we talk a lot about what we call the “jump scares” — how as the song is going, it has a form, you can almost predict what’s going to happen when the chorus is going to hit, but then it’ll take you to some crazy place that you did not expect. And I feel like thinking about that really became the sound of this new record. I do it on “Raven,” I do it on “Take It From Me,” on “Enything.” Pretty much every song has some sort of thing in it where it’s like, “Woah, I didn’t see that coming.” I think that’s something that, at this point, after making so much music, I want to try to reel it back in and focus on. Because a lot of the music that I listen to is just cut and dry drum machine synth vocals, like verse, chorus, verse, chorus, fuckin’ outro.
I feel like you definitely have a sound — anytime I hear a song by you, I know within the first 15 seconds that it’s a song by you, which I think is incredible. I’ve always been so interested in the way that you think about song structure specifically, because you go to so many places in your music. I’m thinking specifically of the first song on Opal — I feel like that is a has a totally different tone than a lot of the songs, but still falls in the same world. The way you structure things feels distinctly you. I’m just curious to know how you think about the structure of a song.
Lionel: It’s hard to say. Sometimes the best structure ideas — like that song specifically, it’s so simple. There’s only really two sections, and I think I was just improvising on a MIDI keyboard. And I’m very limited in my chord palette, actually.
Graham: It doesn’t sound like it. Those chords are crazy on that song.
Lionel: Well, they’re basically the only chords that I play when I sit down at a piano. [Laughs.] But, yeah, when I’m playing something, or when I’m listening to something that I’ve played, even if it’s a sketch, what helps me create the structure is those subtle feelings inside of me. And, you know, I drink a lot of cold brew, so maybe that’s why — I’m kind of an antsy person — so when I’m hearing the music, I really want to hear shifts occur. When I’m listening to the same section for too long, it feels good, but there’s a point in my body where I get slightly antsy or anxious, and then I’m like, OK, there needs to be a big shift here.
I just like those risky maneuvers. Like on “Take It From Me,” you have this part where it gets super noisy for a second, and I definitely relate to that. That’s something I really want to do more, almost like a cinematic developing of the environment of the music. It’s not something I’m really that good at, actually, doing cool production stuff like that. But how I do it instead is I just make really weird structures that I try to be a bit risky with. Because if all of a sudden there’s a really weird chord change, I get this cool sensation in my body if it happens at the right time. And since we have the freedom of modern technology to flexibly create and structure music, you can move things around as the sketch is coming together, and sometimes sections are in the wrong place and then I’ll move that around until my body reacts harmoniously with it. It’s weird. And then I just record everything on top of that, to match that, and then it all fits together. But it’s just following your ear rather than the logic, because I’m never thinking about music theory or anything.
Graham: That’s the best advice, I feel like, for anybody: You gotta follow your ear. One thing I was thinking about when you’re talking about repetitiveness is we both have a deep love of psychedelic music. But something that’s really interesting in that type of music is, obviously there’s this sort of boundless creativity that was coming out of these crazy new technological advancements in recording and tape splicing. But there’s also — I’m thinking specifically of Can or Neu!, how they’re able to play the same drumbeat or the same chord even for 15 minutes straight, and yet it never gets boring. I feel like a lot of it has to do with our attention spans nowadays, the way that music has been — at the risk of sounding like a boomer here — packaged into these 20 second TikTok clips. A lot of times, you see these dudes playing live shows that have a TikTok hit and everyone pulls out their phone for that 15 second moment, but nobody can sing the rest of the lyrics. Love it or hate it, it’s the way that it is. But I think in terms of structure, it is really interesting how there is a way to make a 15 minute thing that just loops forever and is consistently interesting. That’s something that I think about a lot.
Lionel: Yeah, that kind of music, like Can and Neu! and Daphne Oram, it really does hypnotize you into an even more patient state of being. It’s super therapeutic, or it can be. That’s always been an aspect of music I’ve tried to focus on, because it’s what works for me. It’s why I listen to music. I’ve been listening to a lot of The Pretty Things lately, S.F. Sorrow. That album is kind of heavy and Black Sabbath-y, but then at the same time, there are these absolutely angelic, harmonious moments. You’re just in this field of inexplicable emotions — which is basically everything I live for, for music.
Graham: Well, next time I’m in LA, I’ll hit you up and we’ll make something crazy.
Lionel: Yeah, it would be fun to just make some weird shit. Dude, thanks for doing your thing. When I first found your music, I was just like, I’m glad this guy exists.
Graham: Man, I feel the exact same way about you. Sometimes you hear stuff that’s like, Oh, yeah, I was supposed to hear this. I was supposed to find this. It’s a beautiful thing. Thanks for making music, and for hopping on this call.
(Photo Credit: left, Alec Marchant; right, Laura Moreau)
